Shyzer.com

I’ve just spent the past four hours and about fifteen hours in the past month trying to get these home videos I shot onto my computer. I have a program that will record them over, so I gave it a whirl. I transferred a 2 minute video clip and it was 350 MB. Not cool. Plus, both the sound and video was extremely choppy, to the point where it’s unviewable. I’m currently downloading another program to see if that will work any better, but let’s just say for now I’m a bit annoyed.

Anyways, recently I’ve run into a handful of sites that have instantly gone on my “daily reads” list or in my “Random” bookmark folder for later usage. Here’s a few of the best I’ve found in 2005.

Dooce.com - Apparently Dooce has been around for a while now. Since 2001 to be exact. The name became famous across the net in 2002 when Heather, the chick who runs Dooce, was fired from her job over things she had been writing on her blog. Dooce instantly became synonymous for “losing one’s job due to their blog” and ever since then, her site’s been huge. My favorite part of the whole site is how “God” comments on every daily picture. Sometimes he’s out smiting people, so he has his secretaries or interns check in for him. Heather and I couldn’t be more different though. In her words, “I’m a Stay at Home Mom (SAHM) or a Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker. I do both equally well” who lives in Utah and is married. Yet even though we have nothing in common, she writes in a way that is quite refreshing. Plus, it’s fun to see that I’m not the only person who has such a comfortable relationship with my parents that I can tell them to “suck it.”

Angela turned me onto ObliviousMind the other day and it was an instant hit. Her blog teeters on the balance of just recapping her days (something I looooooooathe for a general blog) but she adds a bit of emotion and storytelling into it that keeps it fresh. Worth the read.

You might have heard about this on the news a few days ago, but if you didn’t see the video clip and the interview, this is a must. Last week, a college basketball player sunk a full court shot with 0.6 seconds left on the clock. But that’s not even the amazing part. The next day, he was interviewed by WFMY and during the interview, he was given 16 basketballs and was asked to see if he could sink the exact same shot again. Guess what happened on the 11th shot. Both of the videos can be found on the site linked earlier.

I’m a huge fan of good commercials. I would give anything to be able to create a button called the “Die a painful death” button as well. See, the whole idea behind the button would be that whenever a horrible, gut wrenching awful commercial comes on, I could push the button and every single person who worked on creating the commercial and stared in the commercial would die a painful death. However, this VW commercial would succeed in halting my finger from pushing the button. In fact, I love it so much, I ripped the music from it. If interested, please download it from me right here.

Moving on, I have a new alternative to Mapquest that has yet to lead me astray. It’s called Maps24 and it seems to be the best competitor to crappy MQ. I’ll still never forgive them for telling me to get on a highway that didn’t exist on my way to Baltimore or for making me pull out my own map in the middle of West Virginia to find my own damn route. The zoom-in feature on Maps24 is light-years ahead of MQ and I’ve used it a few times so far without any qualms.

And finally, I found a neat video file that attempts to predict the future of news. It’s called Epic 2014 and it tells the tale of bloggers and Google taking over the likes of print media. Of course, it’s a bit far fetched, but the concept is still plausible, especially after seeing how blogs had such a huge impact on this past Presidential Election, not to mention the countless news stories that have been proven false by bloggers.

Okay, back to working on Shlyrics. Did I mention I’m going to be living in Australia by this weekend? Just thought I’d let everybody know in case they’ve been living in a cave lately.

Well, I’m now back in Northern Virginia after an amazing trip out west. I would have posted while I was out there, but once you read my next post, you’ll understand why I was unable to =) I’m packing up tomorrow morning and driving back down to South Carolina to finally end my Christmas Break of ‘04. I would love to polish off one of the five posts I’m working on right now, but my body is screaming for some sleep. I guess I’ve just been doing way too much Bonsaiing lately =) But some of the posts I’m working on are great. One comes with some audio attachments, another with plenty of pictures, and even another which is a follow-up of this post I made a while ago.

But all in all, this past month has just been incredible. God, I love my family.

[EDIT]Apparently I’ve turned on my Trackback feature without doing anything. Well that’s interesting. I love it when Shyzer just ups and does something without being given any commands! [/EDIT]

Off to California. New post tonight.

Just stopping in to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I promise I’ll have a post later tonight or in the wee hours tomorrow morning. I’ve got tons of new pictures and possible movies to upload, so I promise it will be worth the wait. Until then…

The title above says it all. I’m spending this week working for my uncle in an attempt to earn some much-needed money. If I wasn’t going to Australia, I’d be living comfortably now, but that darn trip is unmercifully gouging my pockets as we speak, forcing me to resort back to my old habits. At the rate I’m going, I’m gonna have to start charging a door fee or something here at Shyzer. If only I could find a way to make some quick cash on the side while working for my uncle during the day. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

I should have another post or two for Shyzer up this week though, hopefully sooner rather than later. In fact, if I don’t have one up by tonight, I want you all to pester me via IM and my cell phone. I’m not kidding.

At 6:30 tonight, I will officially be done with this semester and for all practical matters, my college career. However, before those nine hours get here, I have the following to do:

• Finish the paper I am currently working on and turn it in by 2:00. It must be 10 pages and as of now, I have 3. Oh yeah, and I’m out of things to write about on it. Maybe I should have started on this a little earlier. Wait, what’s that? It’s worth 40% of my grade? Oh, this should be interesting…
• Write a two page paper and turn it in by 5:30.
• Read the last 100 pages of a short novel by 5:30.
• Take an exam at 5:30.
• Finally pass out and give my brain the rest it so rightly deserves.

And yet even though I have all of the above to do, I am sitting here typing a Shyzer post. You all should feel honored. I’m just excited over the prospect of being finished for the semester by tonight. Now if I could just figure out how to bullshit seven more pages…

[EDIT]Upon calculating my Criminal Justice grade, I received some bad news. Out of a possible 410 points, one would need to earn 328 to make a B. I have 327. I have already scheduled a meeting with my professor for next Tuesday, so wish me luck.

I was, however, able to finish my 10 page essay (with 8 minutes to spare!) and finish the 100 pages of my novel. So…so close…so close to this being over…[/EDIT]

I received 7 IMs tonight yelling at me for not uploading a post tonight like I promised. Give me time folks! These babies take me a few hours to draft and in case you haven’t been keeping count (trust me, I have!), I make about 4 posts a week here, which translates into 12 hours a week I put into Shyzer posts alone! Factor in all the maintenance work, upgrades, diplomatic missions, and side pages I work on each week and we’re talking 20 hours a week. Minimum. And I’ve been running for two plus years at that pace.

So until that money starts rolling in, you’ll just have to wait until I’m damn ready to post! =) And besides, the night is still young. I promise, the new post will be up before I go to bed and tomorrow, yet another one will be up!

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I went home for Thanksgiving break and never really got on the computer =) I’ll be heading back to Columbia tomorrow though, so I’ll polish off something and stick it up here on Shyzer sometime tomorrow night. Until then…

First, let’s take care of the important things. Everybody needs to head on over to Stan’s site and listen to his latest song, Pray for Rain. So why don’t you all go ahead and do that now before reading the rest of this post. Go on now, don’t be shy.

I’m serious.

GO!!

And while we’re at it, if you haven’t done so already, you need to go vote in the final round of the Best of Shyzer. To those who have voted already, Thank You! To those who haven’t, may you rot in hell. Wouldn’t you rather receive a thank you? Then go vote!

Okay, now that we have those taken care of, I can get on to the pointless crap I was going to talk about in the first place. If you take a look at the post below, you will see there’s a total of 11 comments. ELEVEN! That, my friends, kicks some serious ass. Way to go on the commenting and keep it up! I also wanted to thank everybody who mentioned to me both on-line and off-line that they enjoyed the post. I know I say this every time, but I truly love receiving feedback on the stuff I write here. It gives me motivation to stay with it.

Although, some of you may be saying to yourselves, “if feedback gives you so much motivation and you received tons of feedback on the last post, where in the hell was your motivation to post during this past week?!” Well, that’s an excellent question and the answer lies in one simple phrase. Writing a senior thesis blows. It’s just that simple! I’m coming down the homestretch here and I officially have 72 hours left until my final draft is due. Which means, during the day I spend my time going to class and working while at night I am forced to replace my usual “Shyzer” time with a new set called “Oh my God, I have no fucking idea how in the world I am going to finish this thing by Monday” time. And somehow, that time is even worse than the name sounds. So yeah, I’ll be spending my entire weekend living in the basement of the library. Come Monday, you’ll probably be able to find me by coming on down and closely listening for the sway of my body since I’ll probably hang myself around Sunday evening.

I do promise, however, to make at minimum one post during Saturday / Sunday. Possibly two, but I won’t push it. I finally put all the word documents I had that contained partial posts into one folder and counted them up. Twenty-seven. TWENTY-SEVEN! Some of them were so outdated that I had to just toss them in the recycle bin, but I was able to salvage a few of them since they were non-time sensitive posts. But Jesus, 27…I’ve made a promise to myself to finish them all before I head to Australia (which, as you guessed it, is one of the 27).

And I just realized something. This post is the type of post I abhor and loathe the absolute most. There was not a single piece of real substance in the entire thing and I basically just wasted a few minutes of everybody’s time by making them listen to my whining. Sorry about that folks. I promise this weekend’s post will something worthwhile.

I have before me two options for tonight. On the one hand, I can stay here and work on the every growing mountain of posts and subsections for Shyzer that I have neglected for months on end. On the other hand, I can accompany Fellner to Ashley’s birthday party.

Why is this even a debate? Adios folks.